Social reporting at this event was integrated in the design of the workshop in collaboration between workshop organisers, and content and process coordinators. The main concerns were issues of privacy, ease-of-use and the trade-off between them.
Issues of privacy:
Early on in the design of the workshop it was decided that in order for people to talk freely across boundaries there should be no concern about their words being made public. We decided that the policy would be to make the default for tools private, with permission sought for anything to be public.
Online publishing tools:
We agreed on a set of publishing tools that were both private and public as can be seen in the email transcript at the end of our planning:
Wiki/private: We bought the Plus plan of Wikispaces ($5/month) so that the wiki could be private and because the maximum size of a file in the Plus plan of wikispaces is 20MB (whereas it is only 10MB on the Basic version). In contrast to the blog, which was for process reflections, the wiki was for putting content. The content was to be multimedia content, including images, text and video. The videos also had to be stored on Wikispaces as they could not be stored on a public place such as YouTube. It is possible to make videos private on YouTube, but there would then be two sets of logins and passwords required for someone to be able to see the video - once to get into the wiki and once to get into YouTube.
Blog/private: We used a free Wordpress blog, hosted by wordpress.com, with the middle privacy setting: “I would like my blog to be visible only to users I choose.” Under this setting someone has to be registered in Wordpress to be able to apply or be invited to read the blog.
Blog/public: The PBPL have a public blogthat they previously used for an event in December 2007 and which we would use for the public face of this event. We also opened a YouTube channel for videos that could be embedded in this blog.
We agreed on a common URL and tag for the event oulop09. The addition of 09 to the URL was with a view to possible future events which could share the same pattern of tag, but which signified the year.
Recording tools:
People were invited to bring digital camera equipment (and appropriate leads) and we made the following equipment available:
Camcorders. We had four Flip cameras that people could borrow for carrying out peer interviews.
Digital cameras: Two CANON cameras and one more sophisticated camera provided by the university. VideoBoo: a Mac recording application that replicates a booth or kiosk for carrying out interviews and which loads directly to your account in YouTube.
Other tools and software MPEG streamclip was used to convert video files to MPEG4 and to easily edit (top and tail) videos. It also considerable reduces the file size.
The OU made several portable computers available.
Some participants used twitter during the event with the hash tag #oulop099.
Workshop tool preparation
Social reporting at this event was integrated in the design of the workshop in collaboration between workshop organisers, and content and process coordinators. The main concerns were issues of privacy, ease-of-use and the trade-off between them.
Issues of privacy:
Early on in the design of the workshop it was decided that in order for people to talk freely across boundaries there should be no concern about their words being made public. We decided that the policy would be to make the default for tools private, with permission sought for anything to be public.
Online publishing tools:
We agreed on a set of publishing tools that were both private and public as can be seen in the email transcript at the end of our planning:
Wiki/private: We bought the Plus plan of Wikispaces ($5/month) so that the wiki could be private and because the maximum size of a file in the Plus plan of wikispaces is 20MB (whereas it is only 10MB on the Basic version). In contrast to the blog, which was for process reflections, the wiki was for putting content. The content was to be multimedia content, including images, text and video. The videos also had to be stored on Wikispaces as they could not be stored on a public place such as YouTube. It is possible to make videos private on YouTube, but there would then be two sets of logins and passwords required for someone to be able to see the video - once to get into the wiki and once to get into YouTube.
Blog/private: We used a free Wordpress blog, hosted by wordpress.com, with the middle privacy setting: “I would like my blog to be visible only to users I choose.” Under this setting someone has to be registered in Wordpress to be able to apply or be invited to read the blog.
Blog/public: The PBPL have a public blogthat they previously used for an event in December 2007 and which we would use for the public face of this event. We also opened a YouTube channel for videos that could be embedded in this blog.
We agreed on a common URL and tag for the event oulop09. The addition of 09 to the URL was with a view to possible future events which could share the same pattern of tag, but which signified the year.
Recording tools:
People were invited to bring digital camera equipment (and appropriate leads) and we made the following equipment available:
Camcorders. We had four Flip cameras that people could borrow for carrying out peer interviews.
Digital cameras: Two CANON cameras and one more sophisticated camera provided by the university.
VideoBoo: a Mac recording application that replicates a booth or kiosk for carrying out interviews and which loads directly to your account in YouTube.
Other tools and software
MPEG streamclip was used to convert video files to MPEG4 and to easily edit (top and tail) videos. It also considerable reduces the file size.
The OU made several portable computers available.
Some participants used twitter during the event with the hash tag #oulop099.
Also see:
About the social reporting document
About social reporting
Landscapes of Practices workshop
What happened?
Reflections and lessons
Closing thoughts